Opera's mail client, M2, has innovated well in using 'access points' to organise email. The mails are stored in a database, and dynamic access points allow multiple views of the same data. Email contains rich amounts of data to allow the filtering system to work well. In bookmarks and contacts however, this meta-data is much more sparse, so rewriting bookmarks/notes/contacts to use access points would not work well. But by using the functions already built-in to Opera ('quick find'), it would be easy to implement a system that would have almost all of the functionality of access-points without abandoning the standard folder hierarchy. Here is what Opera needs to do to implement this:
That would allow BOTH access point type interface AND hierarchical folders to co-exist. New users could stick to what they know best (bookmarks in folder hierarchies), and power users could construct rich organisation, where bookmarks could co-exist in multiple categories. If wanted, a user could store ALL his bookmarks in one real folder, and then use sticky searches for ALL organisation - being exactly ANALOGOUS to the M2 model.
To improve the power of such a system, it would be nice to be able to search the 'date created' and 'date accessed' fields. That way one could easily search for bookmarks created in July for example, or the 20 most recent bookmarks etc. Adding more meta-data would always also help - Opera is already unique in that it uses <meta/> description on the page when adding new bookmarks (though does not look at <meta/> keywords). Doing more data mining when adding a bookmark could help even more. Here are some ideas:
Adding regular expressions (RegExp) to the quick-find box would also greatly enhance the power of this system. Regular expressions are already available in M2, so should be easy to implement here.
